Robert Goodloe Harper (1765-1825), a prominent attorney & U.S. Congressman from S. Carolina & Maryland, was one of the most influential Federalists of the early national period. The South’s leading proponent of the Jay Treaty, a framer of the Sedition Act, the powerful chairman of the House Ways & Means Comm., a dogged supported of Aaron Burr, an outspoken counsel for John Pickering & Samuel Chase, & 2-time failed V.P. candidate, Harper is traditionally remembered as an extreme example of unthinking, reactionary conservatism in an era of intense partisanship & bitter sectional conflict. In this revisionist account, Papenfuse reinterprets Harper’s political philosophy in light of his personal struggle with the moral dilemma of slavery. Illustrations.